Papua’s Hidden Past Haunts Jokowi Presidency

Will the Indonesian president’s reform agenda address human rights concerns in the troubled province?As one of his first official actions as Indonesia’s
president-elect, Joko Widodo announced his intention to build a
presidential palace in West Papua. As one of the most impoverished
regions in the archipelago, with the highest levels of HIV/AIDS in
Indonesia, sluggish economic growth and continued difficulty in
accessing healthcare, skepticism surrounding the utility of Widodo’s gesture has not been unjustified.

Early
indications of Widodo’s position towards allegations of indigenous
massacres, impunity for military violence, and the ongoing separatist
tensions would seem to suggest that “Jokowi,” as he is popularly known,
is adopting a development approach to Papua: Focus on growth, invest in
basic infrastructure, and hope the accusations die down. Even from this
angle, however, questions as to why Papua’s resource-rich territories
have remained entrenched in permanent under-development continue to
plague the regime. With high profile Melanesian activists, international
human rights agencies,
and a vibrant online independence movement calling for a referendum in
the Papuan provinces, the success of Jokowi’s presidency may ultimately
hinge upon how he manages “the Papuan problem.” A recent visit, in which he questioned the accuracy of a report offered by local security
forces on recent violence, represents a glimmer of hope that perhaps
Jokowi will break with the policies of past Indonesian leaders.

Claimed as colonies of the Netherlands in 1828, modern Indonesia and West Papua were occupied as part of the Dutch East Indies trading
empire until World War II. After two young nationalists, future
president Sukarno and future vice president Mohammad Hatta, seized the
chance to declare the independence of Indonesia in August 1945,
international mediation eventually compelled the Dutch to recognize the
new nation at the 1949 Hague Round Table Conference. The Netherlands
ceded control of the vast archipelago, with one important exception; the
Dutch declined to grant jurisdiction of West Papua to Indonesia.

Indonesian
nationalists had envisaged that Papua would be included in the new state
according to uti possidetis juris, the legal doctrine that decolonized
regions should retain the same boundaries they formerly possessed as
colonial territories. Dutch representatives argued that the doctrine was
extinguished by the fact that Papua had been administered separately to their other Pacific colonies. As a result, the international community acknowledged Papua’s status as separate from the state of Indonesia, and the region continued under Dutch sovereignty.

After resuming control in 1950, the Netherlands set in motion a number of education and training
programs directed towards preparing West Papua for independence. This
process saw the establishment of the West New Guinea Council in 1961,
consisting of largely Papuan representatives who had been appointed as a
result of Dutch-sanctioned plebiscites throughout the territory.
Approaching the UN General Assembly, the Council advocated a course of
action wherein a temporary UN government would replace Dutch control
over Papua, whilst an international body assessed the nation’s status.

To this end,
in 1950 West Papua was placed on the agenda of the UN Committee of 24,
also known as the Special Committee of Decolonization. The effect of
this action was that Papua became internationally recognized as a
non-self-governing territory. The Council formally announced West Papua
as the name of their independent state on December 1, 1966, selecting
the “Morning Star” flag for their new nation, in addition to
establishing their own military force and currency.

The
increasing visibility of Papuan nationalism triggered a series of
offensives from the Indonesian military against the independence
movement. The Sukarno government began conducting an extensive
propaganda “reunification” campaign, promoting the notion that Indonesia
was incomplete without Papua. Meanwhile, a declining domestic economy
was prompting closer attention from Jakarta towards Papua’s abundant mineral reserves.

As violence
escalated between Indonesian and Dutch forces, the Kennedy government
and the UN intervened in the 1962 New York Agreement, which ended Dutch
occupation in West Papua. For years both the Soviets and the U.S. had
been supplementing the Indonesian military with supplies of arms and
vehicles, as the two great powers attempted to outbid each other in
favors to Sukarno. Between 1958 and 1961 Indonesia purchased $1.5
billion in Soviet arms, whilst the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) grew
to become the third largest of its kind in the world.

The U.S.
decision to back Sukarno’s claim to Papua was undoubtedly swayed by
these Cold War calculations. From the inception of the state in 1949,
Western governments had become increasingly wary of the potential
Indonesia held for altering the balance of power
in the Pacific. U.S. and Australian policymakers in the mid-50s had
attempted to counter this threat by supporting uprisings in Sumatra and
Sulawesi, calculating that a more
fragmented, economically weaker Indonesia would increase regional
security. The developing military and diplomatic alliance between
Indonesia and Russia, however, caused an abrupt change in American
policy toward Indonesia.

The U.S.
could not fail to realize that Papua was a powerful bargaining tool.
Rather than competing with Russia in a bidding war, the U.S. had the
potential to secure a prize for Indonesia that would decisively shift
the state’s alignment away from the Soviet Union. Whilst the New York
Agreement nominally provided the opportunity for open negotiations on
Papua’s future, in reality it served as a vehicle for the U.S. to convey to the Dutch its foregone conclusions on the Papuan questions.

The New York
Agreement stipulated that Papua would undergo a period of UN temporary
government, which would supervise both Dutch withdrawal and the
beginning of Indonesian control by 1963, after which a vote of
self-determination had to take place. In doing so, the Agreement had the
crucial effect of acknowledging that Papuans had a right to
self-determination.

The
Agreement saw the establishment of the UN Temporary Executive Authority
(UNTEA), which handed power to Indonesia in 1963 after seven months of
supervision. The transfer from Dutch to Indonesian control during this
period occurred without any act of self-determination or consultation
for the Papuan people; however, this did not deter the UN from
immediately and surreptitiously removing Papua from its list of
non-self-governing territories.

Following
UNTEA, West Papua experienced an influx of Indonesian military and
personnel. Local Papuan representative councils were prohibited, and
freedom of speech, cultural expression, and involvement in
pro-independence political parties were severely curtailed. While this
abrupt change of fortunes provoked significant dissent in Papua,
protests against Indonesian occupation were met with brutality. During
the 1981 Tribunal on Human Rights in West Papua, held in Port Moresby,
former governor of West Papua Eliezar Bonay estimated that 30,000
indigenous Papuans were killed during the period of unofficial
Indonesian government from 1963 to 1969, as part of a systematic
campaign of intimidation by the military.

Alongside
this violence, Jakarta devoted considerable resources to investigating
the mineral deposits in the Papuan territories. A persistent thread
running throughout the hidden history of Papua is the enormous mineral
wealth of the region’s mountains. There is scant international awareness
that the region holds the world’s largest gold mine and second largest
copper mine, operated by a subsidiary of U.S. mining conglomerate
Freeport McMoRan. In 1967, the Suharto regime granted a 30-year mining
license to Freeport McMoRan under Indonesia’s Mining Regulation Law No.
11/1967, the result of talks sponsored by the Time-Life Corporation and
directed by David Rockefeller. West Papua’s nickel reserves and forests
were distributed between a number of influential American, European and
Japanese companies, whilst extensive arrangements to export natural gas,
silver, fish, oil, and timber were also devised.

With Papua’s
resources divided up and parceled out in 1967, two years before
self-determination was apparently going to take place, the new Suharto
regime clearly had no intention of accepting any outcome other than
integration with Indonesia. Additionally, several of the world’s most
powerful corporations now had strong reasons to desire minimal
alterations to Papua’s political situation. In the event of
independence, the majority of these economic arrangements would be
nullified, and the expense of establishing mining and felling operations
in Papua would be wasted.

Hence, in
1969, the Indonesian government fulfilled its promises in the New York
Agreement by conducting, ostensibly under UN supervision, an infamous
plebiscite that came to be known as the “Act of Free Choice.”
Discussions in New York concerning potential voting methods had seen the
rejection of universal suffrage, which was dismissed on the basis that
the region’s population was too widely and erratically dispersed.
Instead, the Indonesian procedure of musyasawarah, or traditional
consultation, was accepted in its place.

This process
involved selecting 1022 West Papuan representatives, who were to travel
to Jakarta and then vote on the future of their nation. The voters
unanimously decided in favor of integration with Indonesia, whilst UN
supervisors were intimidated and excluded from the voting process.
Papuan activist Rex Rumakiek, reiterating widely corroborated views on
the plebiscite, notes:

1022
carefully selected tribal leaders… were asked to show hands in front of
officials, which included an intimidating military presence. They of
course voted for integration- it would have been impossible to vote
otherwise when they had been forewarned of what would happen to their
lives and their families if they did.

The sham
referendum was ratified by the UN General Assembly, in spite of reports
of significant human rights violations in the referendum process,
evidenced by the testimony of former UN Under-Secretary General,
Chakravarthi Narasimahan:

It was just a
whitewash. The mood at the UN was to get rid of this problem as quickly
as possible… Nobody gave a thought to the fact that a million people
had their fundamental rights trampled. How could anyone have seriously
believed that all voters unanimously decided to join his [President
Suharto’s] regime?

Despite the
New York Agreement’s stipulation that the plebiscite had to be conducted
in accordance with international practice, in his final presentation on
the outcome of the Act of Free Choice to the General Assembly, UN
Representative in West Papua, Ortiz Sanz, merely noted that an
“Indonesian” voting process was conducted.

It is one of
the great scandals of the United Nations that its supervision of UNTEA
and the Act of Free Choice was able to grant the annexation such a fatal
appearance of legitimacy. The great culpability of the UN, however, lay
in its crucial 1950 recognition of West Papua as a non-self-governing
territory. The ramifications of Papua’s presence on the list can be
detected in Article V of the General Assembly’s 1960 Declaration on the
Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, which calls
for the immediate “complete independence” of “Trust and
Non-Self-Governing Territories.”

In the case
of Papua, the 1950 placement on the list prioritizes Article V over
Article VI, which is continuously cited in response to challenges of
Indonesia’s authority in Papua: “Any attempt aimed at the partial or
total disruption of national unity and the territorial integrity of a
country is incompatible with the purposes and principles of the Charter
of the United Nations.” In acquiescing to Jakarta’s demands from 1963
onwards, and in recognizing the legitimacy of the Act of Free Choice,
the United Nations abandoned its obligations toward a nation that it had
previously acknowledged as possessing the right to self-determination.

As increased
scrutiny turns toward the Jokowi administration, it remains to be seen
whether his reform agenda will generate a more realistic approach
towards human rights concerns and separatist tensions in Papua.
Jakarta’s insistence over the last decade that Papua has nothing to hide
is undermined by its steadfast refusal to allow foreign journalists
into the Papuan provinces, and its earnest attempts to extol Indonesia’s
democratic credentials remain suspect as weekly reports of highlands
killings and unexplained deaths flow in from Papua. The likelihood of a
referendum under the Jokowi administration appears low; it took huge
international pressure, the downfall of President Suharto, and a
personal plea from Australian Prime Minister John Howard before
President Habibie called for a referendum in East Timor in 1999. In any
case, the referendum’s success spelt the death knell for Habibie’s
presidency.

Yet staging
an independence referendum in Papua would hold significant benefits for
Indonesian international credibility, and may hold the key to a
successful resolution of separatist tensions within and without Papua.
Years of domestic transmigration programs, shifting workers from densely
populated areas of Indonesia to the Papuan provinces, have resulted in
dramatic demographic changes, with 2010 estimates projecting a 49/51
split between indigenous and non-indigenous inhabitants of Papua.

With
indigenous Papuans now a minority in the Papuan provinces, and decades
of Papuans growing up under depoliticized, Java-centric education
systems, the outcome of an independence referendum may not be the threat
of republic disintegration as previously supposed. Depending on the
electoral methods and voter qualification systems utilized, Jakarta may
be able to hold a relatively “safe” vote of self-determination, defusing
the legal force of arguments concerning the invalidity of the Act of
Free Choice and reinforcing the current trend of international optimism
towards Indonesia’s new reform era. Whether such moves can improve human
rights in Papua, mollify the military’s hypersensitivity to protest, or
eliminate the butterfly effect of Indonesia’s spiraling
decentralization, remains to be seen. For the present, it seems clear
that the prospects of peace are unlikely to be improved by the
construction of a presidential palace.Sumber : http://thediplomat.com